


Halfway Through the Woods

by lotesse



Category: Into the Woods - Sondheim/Lapine
Genre: Fairy Tales, Gen, Post-Canon, Yuletide 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-02 17:30:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Baker tried to be in love with Cinderella, for a while. Written for Yuletide Madness 2008.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Halfway Through the Woods

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shinealightonme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinealightonme/gifts).



The Baker tried to be in love with Cinderella, for a while. She was so good and sweet and pretty, and Jack was so happy with Red that he thought maybe, just maybe, being in love was what he needed. And she was his baby's mother, and it would be the right thing to do. It would be the happy ending that they all needed.

But he quickly found that she was too sweet, too good, and her gentle ways made him miss his wife's tangy applecider nature even more. Cinderella never chided him when he was foolish or clouted him over the head with the bread when he forgot to add the yeast or burnt it with dreaming. And she was pretty, and that was all wrong. Not to say his wife hadn't been pretty, but it was a different sort from Cinderella's fairytale-princess looks.

She had kissed him, once upon a time. It had been soon after the woods, and everything had been shaky and uncertain like the earth under the Giantess' feet. She had kissed him, and her mouth tasted of flowers and babies. He fancied that it would have been different before - everything, that her mouth would have been overlaid with candy and lace and gold, but she's not the Princess any more. The Prince is dead, and she's the mother of his son. Not his wife, either. And so she tastes of baby's small smells and nothing more. Maybe her mouth always tasted like that, and he only imagines otherwise because he sometimes thinks that everything must be different now than it was before the woods.

When Jack came to him, a little boy scared and unsure on his wedding night - asking - he had no idea what he should say. He should have worked it out by then, because he couldn't expect Cinderella to explain the matter to his son, but had been putting it off. His wife would have slapped him with a damp dishcloth for it, but she wasn't there. And Jack was talking in that terribly earnest and syntactical way that he adopted when he was afraid, a way that he hadn't heard since everything changed, and he had to say something. So he talked about love and trust and biology, and the boy didn't seem to be too scarred. Jack would probably never need the lecture. He didn't doubt that Red had all the information they could ever need right at her fingertips-she always knew things that children shouldn't understand, and no one had managed to figure out how she learned of them. But she would make sure that Jack was all right.

His little baby son was beginning to burble in words, half-defined linguistic constructs lisping against his mostly toothless gums. The baby called Cinderella strings of syllables that started with m-sounds, mamamamomamu. Which was as it should be - she would be the child's mother for his entire life, and the woman that had birthed him had died after only a few months.

They had a little house, more in the woods than out, and he had his own cot while the baby slept pressed up against Cinderella's throat, their double breaths mingling softly at the edges of his hearing in the night. It was lonely, just a little - he was a satellite orbiting a dyad, not the strong third corner of the balanced familial triangle he'd hope for, sought for, before everything had fallen apart.

It wasn't the family he'd had - Cinderella wasn't his wife, and the baby was getting older, and he'd gained two adult children just like that, the practical girl and the dreamy boy, and he'd certainly never expected his children to be like them. But it was a family, of a sort, the only one he had. And he loved them, though they weren't correct or expected or ordinary. They were his, and he loved them more than he'd ever loved anything before, because he knew how easily happiness could be lost or wishes broken.


End file.
